The Government of India’s Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) under Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) in association with NVIDIA, and OpenACC, organized the SAMHAR-COVID19 Hackathon to help researchers combat ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and help the scientific community predict future outbreaks.
Through C-DAC’s program, Supercomputing using artificial intelligence, and Healthcare Analytics-based Research for combating COVID-19, researchers can get resources to find solutions for identifying, tracking and predicting outbreaks. The work has the potential to accelerate workflows for drug discovery and drug repurposing.
When pandemics such as COVID-19 occur, it can be challenging for government and public health officials to quickly gather information so they can coordinate a response. But new technologies such as AI can help predict, minimize and stop the spread of viruses. The goal of the hackathon is to help identify these new solutions while preparing the research community to use HPC tools for predicting future outbreaks.
The first stage of the hackathon was to submit theoretical solutions to provided problem statements. Out of 380 submissions, 25 teams were selected to continue on to the second stage of the hackathon, where they were asked to create a prototype running on GPUs and present it to a jury. Each team attended a GPU Bootcamp to learn GPU technologies they can utilize for their prototypes and was provided access to NVIDIA DGX-1 AI Supercomputer Cluster.
At the end of the hackathon, six winners presented unique solutions ready for deployment were chosen:
- IISERB – AI Guided Drug Discovery
- EagleEye – Crowd, face, symptoms monitoring
- TCS Tridents – COVID CT Detection
- SANJEEVANI – Drug repurposing
- A.Eye – Real-time COVID-19 spread monitoring
- Sequence based classifier- Genetic risk score for COVID-19 analysis
Learn more about upcoming GPU Hackathons at www.gpuhackathons.org/events.
